


a lack of control

by sevenfoxes



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-10
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-05 02:40:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Never let a man know your weaknesses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a lack of control

They don't see each other again until Madrid.   
  
It's been six months and Fury has been giving them all a wide berth. It had taken prompting for him to assign Natasha a new handler, to let her resume the operations work that she had been tasked with before Loki and the Tesseract. There's a beauty to this line of work, the seemingly complicated tasks that are, in reality, a mindless pursuit for her. She breathes deceit and subterfuge.   
  
This finds her in Spain, a dagger flush against her thigh and a flash drive with some very interesting blueprints tucked into her left bra cup. There's a gun and a silencer in the small clutch tucked under her arm, though she rarely has to use firearms. She prefers it that way: they attract attention in a way that a broken neck or a fractured skull doesn't.   
  
Natasha knows he's waiting for her before she even opens her hotel door, before she flips on the light to her room. She knows the way that he smells, the dark hint of leather mixed with the sharp metallic scent of his bow. It gets under her skin, makes her jittery and wet with want, splits her between angry and aroused.   
  
It's the lack of control.   
  
"You've been avoiding me," Clint says, reclining back in the chair near the foot of her bed. His bow and quiver are resting by his feet.   
  
Natasha laughs, but it's forced, less convincing than she can normally pull off. It sounds fake to her own ears. "I've been working," she says, the flash drive skidding to a stop on the table next to her clutch.   
  
"Right." His voice is just measured enough that she's sure he's aware of her request to Fury regarding her assignments. Solo only.   
  
As she leans her hip into the table, his eyes snap down to her legs, bare below her dress. The hemline is high, higher than she normally wears, but necessary to climb up the webbing structure in the elevator shaft of Procalus Global's R&D headquarters. There's a scrape along the inside of her left kneecap that Clint's eyes seem to be focused on, the smudge of blood drying on her skin.   
  
She has never known a man to eat with his eyes the way that Clint does. He consumes with them, picks flesh off of bone, peels away her carefully constructed layers.   
_  
... not until I make him kill you - slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear..._   
  
There is a danger in letting any man know you well enough to hurt you. Never let a man know how to get under your skin. Never let a man know your weaknesses. It is a motto Natasha has lived her life by, a code that has helped keep her alive - one of the few carryovers from her former life. She has perfected being a predator in a world full of sharks.   
  
Natasha doesn't flinch when he stands, when he moves towards her, puts his hand on her hip and leans close enough that his smell is overwhelming, familiar in a way that truly frightens her.   
  
"You need to go," she says, setting her jaw stiffly. She turns her face away from him.   
  
"Nat?" he asks, pausing for a moment as if giving her a moment to reconsider.   
  
(Clint is the only man she will ever let call her that.)   
  
She doesn't.   
  
  
  
\--   
_  
  
  
The arrow is sticking out of her thigh, just low enough to miss her femoral artery. There's blood all over her hands, and it still shocks her how her own is so different than the blood of others, how it's darker, richer. The scent is so strong that she can taste it in her mouth. It is slick between her fingers, growing tacky as it congeals and dries.  
  
He's hit her with a wound that makes it near impossible to move without the risk of tearing into her thigh, shredding the last bit of flesh protecting that all important artery.  
  
"I'm here to kill you," he says, and she knows him by reputation. Hawkeye.  
  
She's always imagined him a little bit taller. Dark hair and eyes. Not at all in line with the man standing over her, a sharp little arrowhead pointed square between her eyes. He's prettier - somehow softer yet more dangerous looking than she expected.  
  
"What are you waiting for then?" Natasha asks in Russian, cool as ice, though she feels like a feral animal inside, desperate to sink her teeth into him. She wants to see him bleed. She wants to mix his blood in with hers and watch it wage war across her palm.  
  
She wants to fuck him. She wants to make him suffer.  
  
"You to make a choice," Hawkeye answers._   
  
  
  
\--   
  
  
  
Clint calls her in New York City. She lets it roll to voicemail as she inventories her weapons, reloading clips and oiling her favourite glock.   
_  
I wouldn't have done it. Jesus, Nat._   
  
It's followed by a minute and a half of him just breathing on the other end of the line before it finally cuts off.   
  
He's seen the tape of her interrogation of Loki.   
  
(The part that scared Natasha the most was not Loki's threat of her death, not even a death at the hands of Clint who has been privy to all her darkest confessions and fears, but rather the part that followed, the thought of Clint coming back to himself with her blood on his hands, the broken look of horror that in that moment, standing in front of Loki, she could picture so crisp and clear in her mind. That had scared her.)   
  
Natasha deletes the voicemail message.   
  
  
  
\--   
_  
  
  
The first time they work together, he tells her to call him Clint.  
  
(It's been a year of training, of reconditioning. Of breaking herself down and learning how to put together the shattered pieces that remain. Although she tells PyschOps that she is fine, tempering the good with the bad to make her responses seem more realistic and in line with what they want to hear, she does not feel whole. She feels an ache that echoes much like regret, and the truth is that Natasha simply does not know what to do with the sentiment. It hangs on her shoulders like a weight she cannot shake.  
  
At times she still feels like that feral animal at Hawkeye's feet. )  
  
He calls her Nat, and she tells him that she's Natasha or Black Widow, and if he has a problem with that, she'd be happy to relieve him of his tongue.  
  
It doesn't seem to phase him in the slightest. Clint reaches into his case and snaps his bow open. "Am I going to have to keep my eye on you?"   
  
Natasha grins. "Only if you want to."_   
  
  
  
\--   
  
  
  
In Geneva, there's another voicemail. Natasha's on the edge of drunk, nursing a nasty dislocated shoulder and a foul mood.   
_  
You cleared your ledger with me years ago, Natasha.  
  
(...and then he'll wake just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I'll split his skull.) _   
  
Her finger lingers over the nine, aching to press down, aching to delete the message.   
  
Instead, the phone flies across the room.   
  
  
  
\--   
  
  
  
_Clint kisses her first.  
  
Natasha punches him so hard in the ribs she bruises two of them.  
  
Clint kisses her again three days later. When she goes for the soft spot just below his ribs this time, he drops her hard, his tongue running over his lower lip like a tease. He doesn't see the kick to his kneecap coming, though.  
  
They both like to learn their lessons the hard way.  
  
(A lack of control.)_   
  
  
  
\--   
  
  
  
She takes his fingers in Sarajevo, in the shitty safehouse that she tracked him to. Clint had left enough of a trail to let her know that he expected her, that he wanted her to follow.   
  
Natasha loves his hands, the simple power of them, their understated strength. He gives her two fingers deep - long, elegant fingers that she's stared at wrapped around an arrow or pulling back the tense wire of his bow.   
  
Clint's other hand presses into her thigh, his thumb resting over the scar left by the arrow he sank into her flesh all those years ago. He nudges her bent knees with his torso, urging her to spread them wider until she concedes.   
  
He eats her with his eyes, consumes her until she finds she has to close her own eyes against it. As soon as they slip shut, he begins to speak, to say the things she doesn't quite want to hear.    
  
Never let a man know how to get under your skin. Never let a man know your weaknesses. Never let a man give you his heart, and never -  _never_  - give a man your heart in return.   
  
When she comes, he calls her _Nat_ and presses his thumb into the scar hard enough that she gasps.   
  
(In the morning, she'll be gone, halfway to Copenhagen before Clint begins to stir in his bed. She'll order black coffee on the train and let her mind drift to the ache still lingering between her thighs, the ghost of his fingers on her scar.   
  
She'll only find the arrow tucked in her carry-on when she reaches Berlin.)


End file.
